Outdooria — The Spot 2018
Outdooria is a swiss job portal specialized in the sports industry. We met Vanessa Tribet, CEO & founder, at the Spot 2018. She detailed with us some of the challenges when launching a new job portal.
The Swiss Unicorn: Your job offers are not only in Switzerland but in other European countries and even in Canada. Which was your strategy at the beginning, start local or directly go global?
Vanessa Tribet: I decided to focus on the Swiss market. There is already a great number of opportunities here; they are just hidden. There are currently many open positions in Switzerland and enough people looking for jobs in this field. Our goal is to match these job offers with the appropriate candidates and give a push to the sports sector.
You mention that these job posts are often hidden or hard to find in standard platforms. How come you have access to this type of information?
It is not just that these open positions are hidden. In some cases, companies are simply not publishing job offers through standard channels because of the costs. If you have a good network and you know the right people, you can have access to this information.
As I used to do some volunteering in the sports industry, I could see that there were a lot of positions just waiting to be filled out. I was already putting people in contact at that time. This is when I realized that there was an opportunity to make a business out of it.
We have a B2B approach as we contact directly the companies and try to be present at many events. Fortunately, we start to be known in the field. Companies are now contacting us and, in some cases, register on our website without any intervention from our side.
How did you validate your early business assumptions?
I had another job in parallel which I kept at the beginning while doing my market study. I contacted several companies in my network but also made many cold calls. Our website was very simple at first. It was only informative. After two weeks, we received more than 100 messages with questions about our platform. This was our first demand validation.
People are still surprised nowadays that such a specialized platform did not exist before.
There are many recruiting platforms on the web. How do you differentiate yourselves?
There are several elements that help us to stand out from the crowd. We target a niche market, sports, and we do not charge companies for the job offers that they publish. This allows companies to post volunteering opportunities or internships. This is not possible with the usual paying platforms. This strategy also allows us to create a community. Our thinking assumes that the market of tomorrow will be based on mutual aid.
We generate our revenue on the complementary services that we offer to the companies, the schools, and the candidates. We have advisory services on how to build a sound CV, how to find a job that really fits one’s interests or how to manage your team efficiently. We do not only support you during the hiring process but also afterward.
So, the matchmaking platform is the entry door for your consulting services.
Exactly
There is a chicken and egg challenge with all matchmaking platform. For your product to have some value, you need enough people who post job offers and enough people who look for jobs.
How was your go to market strategy?
We had to begin with one side. We decided then to start with the candidates. It happened to be quite easy. It is relatively simple to find people who are looking for jobs in the sports industry. We started to contact schools and be present at professional events. We could rapidly establish a pool of candidates thanks to this approach. This helped us in our contacts with the companies in a later stage. It was easier to convince them to join the platform with our pool of users and the fact that we do not charge anything for the job posts.
I would like to highlight that it is not free, it is offered. It is a commercial gesture that we do.
Why are you present today at the Spot?
We are looking to build trust among the professionals. We need to be visible at such events to meet people and give credence to our position. One of our differentiating factors, i.e. the fact that we do not charge anything for the job posts, can also be a weak point if we do not properly communicate our value proposition.
Can you give me your vision for the company in the next 5 years?
One element that we would like to add in the hiring process is augmented reality (AR). I would like to use technology to bring more humanity. Nowadays, HR managers are overwhelmed by the number of applications. They cannot see every candidate. There is less and less human contact and we need to find solutions to this. I would like to bring the HR manager and the candidate closer and humanize certain aspects of the hiring process.
Another mid-term goal is to expand our team. For now, it is my two associates, an intern and me.
What do you like most about your leadership role?
Be able to change the world.
Is entrepreneurship something that you always wanted to do?
It just happened by chance. I do not come from an entrepreneurial environment, but I always knew some people that would start small businesses and companies. I always thought that this was great and so one day my partner asked why I was not trying as well.
This question was the start of my entrepreneurial journey. This is a terrible question. As soon as you formulate it, it will never leave you no matter what you do.
For 1.5 years that I started, I must say that I did not meet any despicable person. I am amazed to see how everybody in the sports industry is driven by the same passion, the same values.
Last words for other entrepreneurs to be?
Learn to sleep less.
Keep in mind that it might start very fast. I never thought that it would really work. I had so much fun every day at work that I even asked myself if that was normal.
Do not neglect the fact that it might work very well, very fast and do not feel sorry for that.
The Swiss Unicorn is an online startup media which focuses on Swiss startups. We publish interviews of different actors of the Swiss startup ecosystem.
